News in focus

largest amount of material ever brought come into contact with Bennu. It will proba- minerals altered by water that might have once
back from an asteroid. The Japan Aerospace bly be several weeks before the curators open flowed through Bennu.
Exploration Agency ( JAXA) collected less than the heart of the sample container and begin NASA has scheduled a press conference on
one milligram from the asteroid Itokawa in extracting the bulk of the material inside. 11 October to unveil the first scientific results.
2005, and 5.4 grams from the asteroid Ryugu Early experiments could include looking at
in 2019. how material that was on the surface of Bennu On to the next asteroid
Bringing planetary samples back to Earth compares with what came from deeper inside At least 70% of the Bennu material will be
allows researchers to use cutting-edge the asteroid, Thompson says. OSIRIS-REx’s saved for scientists outside NASA and for
laboratory techniques to study what the robotic arm might have plunged as deep as future generations to study. Furthermore,
rocks are made of. The NASA curation team 40 centimetres under Bennu’s rubbly surface 4% of the sample will go to the Canadian
put the Bennu samples into an atmosphere of when executing its fist bump. Space Agency, which helped to build a laser
pure nitrogen soon after the capsule touched One of the hypotheses that scientists will instrument for OSIRIS-REx, and 0.5% will go to
down, to reduce the potential for contamina- be testing is whether there are two major JAXA in exchange for samples of Ryugu, so that
tion. That will enable scientists to study the types of rock in the sample. Images taken researchers can compare the two asteroids.
asteroid’s geology and chemistry, preserved during the collection suggest that much Meanwhile, the rest of the OSIRIS spacecraft
all the way back to the formation of the Solar of the sample is very dark, Lauretta says. continues to fly through space after dropping
System, more than 4.5 billion years ago. The But there is also some much brighter mate- off its sample-return capsule. It is headed to
pristine material hasn’t been altered by pass- rial that might be cemented together with study Apophis, an asteroid with a different,
ing through Earth’s atmosphere, as happens carbonate or other light-coloured minerals. ‘stony’, chemical composition that will whizz
with meteorites. “The thing that will really be The team will also be looking for signs of clay past Earth dramatically close in 2029.
different about this sample is we’ll have that
chain of custody of keeping it protected from
Earth’s atmosphere,” says Nicole Lunning, the

ANTIMATTER
mission’s lead sample curator at the Johnson
Space Center.

Precious cargo
FALLS DOWN,
NOT UP
Bennu is a carbon-rich asteroid, so the sam-
ples might resemble carbon-rich meteorites
that have fallen to Earth, Thompson says.
The bits collected by OSIRIS-REx probably
contain organic compounds — carbon-based Observing this simple phenomenon
molecules found in many meteorites that are
the building blocks of many exciting types had eluded physicists for decades.
of chemistry, including those conducive to
By Davide Castelvecchi

P
life. “What I find most fascinating are the the biggest problems in physics — how the
nucleobases, the components of the genetic Universe came to be made almost exclusively
code that make up all life from DNA and hysicists have shown that, like of matter, even though equal amounts of mat-
RNA,” says Daniel Glavin, the senior scientist everything else experiencing gravity, ter and antimatter should have arisen from
for sample return at NASA’s Goddard Space antimatter falls downwards when the Big Bang.
Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. These dropped. This outcome is not surpris-
compounds have been found in meteorites ing — a difference in the gravitational Same mass, same gravity
before, but those rocks were not as pristine as behaviour of matter and antimatter would In the topsy-turvy world of antimatter, atomic
the Bennu samples are expected to be. “We can have huge implications for physics — but nuclei are made of negatively charged anti-
trust the results, because this stuff is clean,” observing it directly had been a dream for protons, orbited by positively charged
he says. decades, says Clifford Will, a theoretician antielectrons, or positrons. According to the
NASA curators will work their way through who specializes in gravity at the University of standard model of particle physics, however,
unpacking and studying the dust and pebbles Florida in Gainesville. “It really is a cool result.” the opposite charges should be pretty much
inside OSIRIS-REx’s storage container in the Because gravity is much weaker than other the only difference: particles and antiparticles
coming weeks. Using nitrogen-filled glove- ubiquitous forces, such as electrostatic attrac- should have nearly all the same properties. In
boxes, technicians are analysing the samples tion or magnetism, separating it from other particular, experiments have confirmed that
with scanners and other instruments to dis- effects in the laboratory is a delicate affair, positrons and antiprotons have the same
cern how many rock types were collected, and says Jeffrey Hangst, who leads of the ALPHA-g masses as their matter counterparts, within
they will record the samples’ colour, volume experiment at CERN, the particle physics lab- the limits of experimental errors.
and porosity. oratory near Geneva, Switzerland. “Gravity According to Einstein’s general theory of
Curators have an abundance of material is just so bloody weak, you really have to be relativity, all objects of the same mass should
to work with. When they opened the sample careful,” says Hangst, who is also a physicist at weigh the same — in other words, they should
canister, they found many dark, fine-grained the University of Aarhus in Denmark. He and experience exactly the same gravitational
particles from Bennu, more than expected, his collaborators reported the findings on acceleration.
that they carefully extracted and that the 27 September in Nature (E. K. Anderson et al. To put this principle to the test, Hangst and
quick-look team have begun analysing. Soon, Nature 621, 716–722; 2023). his collaborators wanted to design an experi­
the team will get a chance to study the grains Similar experiments will aim to test ment that would show what happened when
that were picked up by 24 stainless-steel whether gravity acts with the same strength the neutral atom antihydrogen was dropped.
contact pads on the outside of the sample con- on antimatter as it does on matter. Any tiny “It’s almost impossible to do an experiment
tainer — which were the first things to actually discrepancies could help to solve one of with a charged particle, so antihydrogen is

14 | Nature | Vol 622 | 5 October 2023

 are still rather large, but the experiment can at
least conclusively rule out the possibility that
antihydrogen falls upwards.

Experimental milestone
In 2010, Hangst’s team was the first one to
succeed at trapping antihydrogen for an
extended time, and starting in 2016 they were
able to measure how the antiatoms absorb
light. But the gravity experiment required a
new level of sophistication, he says. “This is by
far the most difficult thing that we’ve done.”
Ruggero Caravita, a physicist at the Italian
National Institute for Nuclear Physics in Trento,
points out that no one would have expected
antimatter to fall up, if nothing else because
MAXIMILIEN BRICE/CERN

antiprotons are made of antiquarks. But these

only constitute less than 1% of an antiproton’s
mass: the rest is the energy that keeps them
together. “Insiders have long expected that any
violation, if it exists, cannot be over 1%,” says
Inside the ALPHA experiment facility at CERN, where physicists can make antihydrogen. Caravita. Going beyond that would subvert
not only the theory of gravitation, but also the
the perfect candidate,” says Hangst. When opening any gas container, the con- standard model of particle physics. Still, the
Antimatter particles are routinely created in tents tend to expand in all directions, but in ALPHA-g result was a milestone, he says.
laboratories. For example, most particles pro- this case the antiatoms’ low velocities meant Caravita is leading a third CERN experiment,
duced by high-energy particle collisions are that gravity had an observable effect: most of called AEgIS, which will attempt to measure the
made in pairs — one particle of matter and its them came out of the bottom opening, and gravitational force on a beam of anti­hydrogen
antiparticle. But it is hard to get antiparticles only one-quarter out of the top. atoms in the absence of any magnetic fields.
to combine into antiatoms because antimatter To make sure that this asymmetry was due Perez’s GBAR will aim to reach 1% precision
particles are typically very short-lived. When to gravity, the researchers had to control the by first making positive antihydrogen ions
an antiparticle meets a particle, they both strength of the magnetic fields to a precision (antihydrogen with an extra positron), which
cease to exist and turn back into energy, in a of at least one part in 10,000. This was per- will help to cool the gas down to a fraction of
process called annihilation. In a world made haps their most remarkable feat, says Patrice a degree above absolute zero.
primarily of matter, this makes it hard for anti- Pérez, a physicist at the French Alternative Other efforts aim to measure gravity acting
matter particles to find each other. Energies and Atomic Energy Commission in on positronium, a short-lived particle made of
CERN is currently the only place in the Gif-sur-Yvette, and spokesperson for GBAR, one electron and one positron orbiting each
world where antihydrogen can be made. It another of CERN’s antihydrogen experiments. other. ALPHA-g itself plans to aim for 1% preci-
has an accelerator that makes antiprotons The results were consistent with the anti­ sion by letting antihydrogen atoms bump up
from high-speed proton collisions, and a atoms experiencing the same force of gravity and down and form a quantum superposition
‘decelerator’ called ELENA that slows them as hydrogen atoms would. The error margins with themselves.
down enough to be held for further manip-
ulation. Several different experiments feed
off ELENA in CERN’s antimatter research hall.

ALPHAFOLD TOUTED
ALPHA-g is one of them, and it combines anti-
protons with positrons that it collects from a

AS BOON FOR DRUG

radioactive source.

Antimatter in a can
After making a thin gas of thousands of
antihydrogen atoms, researchers pushed it
up a 3-metre-tall vertical shaft surrounded by
DISCOVERY — BUT IS IT?
superconducting electromagnetic coils. These Questions remain about whether the AI tool can
can create a kind of magnetic ‘tin can’ to keep
the antimatter from coming into contact with really shake up the pharmaceutical industry.
matter and annihilating. Next, the researchers
By Carrie Arnold

A
let some of the hotter antiatoms escape, so Most drugs work by binding to various sites
that the gas in the can got colder, down to just on proteins, and AlphaFold could predict the
0.5 °C above absolute zero — and the remaining fter Google Deepmind’s AlphaFold structures for proteins that scientists previ-
antiatoms were moving slowly. proved that it could predict the 3D ously knew little about.
The researchers then gradually weakened shapes of proteins with high accuracy In August, the biotechnology firm
the magnetic fields at the top and bottom of in 2020, chemists became excited Recursion, based in Salt Lake City, Utah,
their trap — akin to removing the lid and base about the promise of using the open- announced that it had calculated how 36 bil-
of the can — and detected the antiatoms using source artificial-intelligence (AI) programme lion potential drug compounds could bind to
two sensors as they escaped and annihilated. to discover drugs more quickly and cheaply. more than 15,000 human proteins for which

Nature | Vol 622 | 5 October 2023 | 15